ANN TOEBBE:
Days of Our Lives
May 5 - June 10, 2023
Public reception: Friday, May 5th, 5:30 – 8 pm
JFK, Lizzie and Me, 2023, gouache, oil and paper collage on panel, 18 x 22 inches
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Days of Our Lives, an exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based artist, Ann Toebbe. The exhibition will be on view from May 5 – June 10, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, May 5 from 5:30 – 8:00 PM.
Memory has always been a prominent subject in Toebbe’s work. In Days of Our Lives, she reflects on time spent, and time wasted, during her adolescence in the late 80s and early 90s, when talking on the phone with friends, playing video games, and watching television were all vitally important. While these light moments are sprinkled throughout each painting in Days of Our Lives, their backdrop is the tender care Toebbe’s mother provided in her childhood home on the westside of Cincinnati.
School Morning depicts cast shadows in the early-morning light. Toebbe has just woken up to see her school uniform set out by her mother over the radiator so she can dress in the warmth of the blowing heat. Tornado Warning captures a picnic scene of snacks, a radio and candles set up under the stairs near her mother’s many laundry products – a kind shelter away from the storm.
The exhibition’s celery-green accent wall showcases Margie's Hummels, a recreation of a Hummel figure collection that Toebbe’s mother displayed in the childhood bedroom the artist shared with her older sister. This was one of the many such objects that her mother adorned the home with, imbuing it with levity and domestic warmth. The custom-cast and fused, oversized glass figurines are crafted to look like the paper collage objects Toebbe often adds to her paintings.
Formally, Days of Our Lives takes an everything-goes approach that finds Toebbe experimenting with figuration and utilizing images sourced from personal photos, memories, and google searches. As always, Toebbe’s intuitive compositional strategy generates a dizzying range of perspectives; her highly personal painting technique draws on both her formative years studying sculpture and her current role as a painting professor.
Now an established artist and raising teenage children of her own, Toebbe shows deep appreciation for her mother's drive to care for life's smallest details.
Ann Toebbe was born in Cincinnati and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997. She earned an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2004 and a DAAD Scholarship to the Universität der Kunst, Berlin in 2004-05. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant and was awarded a 2022 IL Council for the Arts Fellowship. Recent residencies include The Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and AiR at Pilchuck Glass School. Between 2020-23 Toebbe curated an exhibition at The Spring Break Art Fair, NYC, and was included in group exhibitions at Nassima-Landau Project, Tel Aviv, Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, Allouche Benias Gallery, Athens, Greece, The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago and Chart Gallery, NYC among others. In 2022 Toebbe presented solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and a survey exhibition at The University of Illinois Springfield traveling to Wasserman Projects in Detroit, MI.
